


don't look now (everything's on fire)

by ArmedWithMyComputer



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Apathy, Blood, Confusion, Delusions, Destruction, Hallucinations, Jasper might be going a bit crazy by this stage, Minor Injuries, Paranoia, basically just my belated season 2 predictions, basically lots of Jasper breaking down, incarceration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-11 19:26:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2080254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmedWithMyComputer/pseuds/ArmedWithMyComputer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two-part series in which I delve into two possible sides of Jasper Jordan that could result from his imprisonment in Mount Weather.</p><p>First up: "His fingers scrabble at the window, which has chicken wire laced through it to keep him even more confined, and slams his shoulder, face, fists against the unrelenting surface.  Jasper feels primal, and raw, because he’s got nothing else to lose, and he knows it. He will tear this building to the ground, and revel in the destruction."</p><p>Secondly: "The walls are always there, always white, and there’s a comforting aspect to the regularity with which the room never deviates from. There’s safety in this lack of movement, of caring, and he relishes in the blank embrace of the white walls. Finally, for the first time in his life, Jasper doesn't feel like he’s struggling."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He wakes up, and it’s quiet.

Jasper lays there for a moment, realising that there’s an actual mattress beneath him, and a real pillow. He breathes in the antiseptic air, feeling the cooling chill of air being artificially pumped into the room, and registers the fact that he’s not in his own clothes.

Then, his eyes open to see white—and everything goes wrong.

He can’t smell burnt flesh anymore, and his skin is strangely devoid of grime and old blood. The roof above him is startlingly white, and it looks so familiar and shocking at the same time. The whole situation feels surreal, like Jasper’s missed some vital chapter of the story, and he flips out.

A scream rips out of his throat, and it feels like it’s strangling him. The noise is brutal and foreign in the sterile environment, but he can’t help it. Jasper launches himself off the bed, wound so tightly with sudden adrenaline and pent-up fear.

All reason is drained out of his mind, as he lands on the freezing ground, his feet seizing up against the harsh temperature, but he feels like a trapped animal.

Maybe that’s all he is.

Jasper can see at a glance that he’s alone in the room, that there’s only a blank white door with a tiny window to provide him with any answers—and he’s still shrieking at the top of his lungs. He’s not even screaming any words, just tortured sounds that he’s been keeping inside him for weeks.

The exertion of exercising his lungs so thoroughly sends a blast of pain through his spear wound, but it’s never really stopped hurting anyway—so Jasper just bares his teeth in a predatory manner, and continues to howl with everything he has left inside.

When he charges towards the door, he feels a twinge of tearing skin, and looks down to see an IV dangling behind him and a trail of blood.

That doesn’t stop him though, and he hits the door with such force that it almost puts a dent in his screams. Almost.

His fingers scrabble at the window, which has chicken wire laced through it to keep him even more confined, and slams his shoulder, face, fists against the unrelenting surface. Jasper feels primal, and raw, because he’s got nothing else to lose, and he knows it.

It’s sometime around that moment when he realises that he’s lost his sanity.

And Jasper just can’t bring himself to care.

Eventually, his abused lungs can’t produce any more sound, and his screams are strangled into silence. But his rage is still fuelled by such deep and undeniable emotions that Jasper continues. He scratches and bashes at the door until his fists are bleeding, and the stark whiteness begins to look scuffed.

He turns, and rips the lone picture down from the wall, offensive in its range of colours, snaps it across his knee. He overturns every single piece of furniture in the room, and kicks at it like he’s been done a grave disservice by the couch.

Jasper is fairly sure that he’s going through a mental breakdown—but he’s never felt more alive.

He doesn’t know who he’s most angry at, the people on the ARK or the ones who’ve imprisoned him for the second time, or the Grounders who speared him and mutilated his body with tribal symbols. But he does know that he feels rage, hot enough to fuel him forever.

Ripping up the starched bed linen to shreds feels like the best decision he’s ever made, and he lets out a whoop of demented joy as he flings the pieces across the room.

He picks up the IV stand like a bat, and starts swinging wildly at the walls. The muscles in his arms are developed and strong, after weeks of surviving, and he begins to lay into the sink on the wall with a manic joy. Jasper beats at the sink again and again, until the ceramic begins to crack, and then finally chunks of it crash to the ground, sending bits into his bare feet and drawing blood.

Water sprays up from the decimated sink, completing the scene of complete chaos.

There’s a small security camera above the door, mounted up high so Jasper can’t get at it, but he looks right into the lens and grins slowly. There’s blood on his hands from his assault on the door and furniture, and he smears it all over his face, his eyes wide and glinting dangerously. He thinks about the strangers, just watching him from behind the camera lens, and it only serves to make him angrier.

He bends down slowly and picks up a hunk of ceramic sink, testing it in his grip for a split second. Then he hurls it at the camera with such force that it draws a violent laugh out of him, one that sounds deep and unnatural because of his hoarse throat. The camera drops to the ground, no longer functioning, and Jasper begins his assault on the door anew, with the heavy projectiles that now litter the white floor.

Jasper is done keeping everything locked up inside him, and he wants his captors to realise it.

.

He wakes up in a white room, and he can’t remember losing consciousness.

The room is immaculate again, and there’s another IV in his arm. Jasper swings his feet over the side of the bed again, this time in a more controlled manner, and notices that the blood has been cleaned off his hands and face.

Jasper looks up at the security camera, and cocks his head to the side. Is this a challenge?

Every second that he stays still is another second that the tide of anxiety and fear rises up within him, and he will not lose himself to that again. He spent weeks being terrified on Earth, after nearly dying, and the throbbing in his chest was a constant reminder that he wasn’t safe.

He refuses to become that scared kid again.

There’s a rising pressure that’s beginning in his chest, and Jasper clenches his fists as he gets to his feet. The red IV is left on the bed behind him. He stalks over to the door once again, and stares out the window, seeing nothing but a blank corridor. There is no one in the cell opposite him—and that fact boils his blood.

Jasper needs the others.

He longs for Monty, who always knew how exactly to calm him down when he got so agitated during those first few weeks – who held his hand tightly as he sobbed in their makeshift tent from the brutal agony left over from the spear, days after Clarke had ‘released’ him from the drop-ship. He feels the loss of Clarke with a sharp stab in his heart, the one who’d sewn him back together, and fought so damn hard for his life. Jasper thinks of Finn, the guy who’d called him “buddy,” and been so kind and considerate to everyone.

Inevitably, he begins to think of Octavia—of her strong spirit and personality, and then panics when he realises that he has no memory of seeing her during those last few vital minutes before they’d all crowded onto the drop-ship.

Faces rush through his mind; Bellamy, Raven, Monroe, Harper, and dozens of the other kids.

“Where are my people?” Jasper screams up at the security camera, his whole body tensing with the force of his worry, “What have you done to them?” _What have you done to me?_

He screams and yells over and over again, demanding to know something, anything, about his friends. The longer it goes without a response, the more agitated he gets—and eventually, Jasper can barely think though the throbbing in his head.

It forces him to his knees, until he’s just a gasping, wheezing mess of pain and anxiety. Jasper pounds his fist against the floor with as much strength that he can muster, and drags in a breath through the mass of agony that is centred in his chest.

“I’ll kill you all,” He spits out through gritted teeth, “I’ll make you pay.”

The world melts away then, into fractured moments of fear and intermittent rage—but this time he sees the pink gas filter out of the vents, and recognises it for the root of all their problems after the drop-ship explosion, before he pitches forward onto the freezing floor and passes out.

It’s more of a mercy this time, though, because the Grounders had started creeping in on the sides of his vison, and that never ended well.

.

Jasper wakes up, and spends a few seconds deciding how he wants this round to go.

He needs to get out, out into the sun and wind and rain – but for that he needs a plan. He can’t just keep destroying the room every time, and hoping that things will turn out differently. An ebb of panic and paranoia washes over him briefly, but he rides it out, and tries to think of Monty and all his calming techniques.

Monty. He needs Monty.

So Jasper tugs the needle out of his arm for the third time, and rips a piece of the white shirt off quickly. He ties it around his mouth and nose in some simple defence against the gas, grabs the IV stand, and lays right into the window on the door again.

It takes a few hard slams, but a crack appears quickly, around the same time that the gas starts pouring through.

He’s frantic by this point, and abandons the metal pole the second a small hole appears. Jasper digs his fingers into the glass, struggling to pull it out from the door, and manages to get his bloody fingers wrapped around the chicken wire that’s laced through the glass.

There’s no movement in the corridor outside, but he screams anyway, muffled through the strip of cloth. He stretches his hands further into the blood-stained glass hole, and wriggles his fingers through the wire, slicing them further.

“Monty!” He calls out desperately, “Clarke! Octavia! Finn! Bellamy!”

Jasper can see the swirling gas rising towards him from his peripheral vision, and he jams his stinging fingers though as much as he can. His legs start failing him then, turning to jelly and dragging his body down with them, and his mind turns sluggish as well.

He hooks his hands into the glass and wire as much as he can though to keep himself upright, and ends up hanging limply from the smashed port-hole window, surrounded by glass.

.

He wakes up, and realises that he hasn’t eaten in days.

They must be feeding him somehow, because while his weight appears to have dropped significantly, he isn’t dead. Jasper stares curiously at the IV, as if seeing it in a different light, and wonders what exactly the fluid bags hold. Nutrition of some sort, and hydration for definite.

Jasper traces the bruise on his arm, surrounded by older pinpricks, and studies the liquid flowing into his veins. There are no labels on the IV bags, no indication of what they could be giving him.

He eases the needle out from beneath his pale skin, and darts over to the door quickly. The needle fits in between the crack between the door and the doorframe, and he jiggles it around frantically—to try and trigger the lock mechanism.

Nothing happens for a few minutes, and he can almost hear the hissing of pink gas, but when he flinches around, there’s none to be seen—yet. He twitches slightly, and then returns to his task.

When he feels the needle hit what could be the lock, he bites the inside of his cheek in anticipation, but then his ears detect the definite sound of the vents opening. Jasper works fast, slamming his fist against the crack and trying new ways to force the needle between the mechanism, but then he feels the needle snap.

He drops the broken IV needle in anger and disappointment, and punches the door in frustration. Then he topples over onto the floor, unconscious.

.

Jasper wakes up, and there’s a Grounder with a spear standing directly beside the bed.

A jagged yelp erupts out of his body, and he jerks to one side, tumbling off the bed and landing on the floor in a tangle of limbs. He scoots back to the opposite wall, chest heaving with panicked hyperventilation, and is frozen for a precious few seconds.

The figure that haunts his nightmares is suddenly in front of him, snarling and terrifying him without sound. He screams silently, and some part of his mind wonders why his captors aren’t stopping this. Surely if they “care,” enough to knock him out and clean him up every time he gets bloody, they wouldn’t want a Grounder to kill him in his own cell.

His lips start to move quickly then, and Jasper finds himself begging silently for mercy, to be spared from the brutal death that he’d so narrowly escaped the first time. There are tears welling up in his eyes, and his vision is going both blurry and sharp at the same time.

He still sees the menacing figure raise the spear, and throw it directly into his chest.

Jasper slams into the wall anew and his hands come up to scrabble against the spear embedded in his chest. They meet empty air, and through the agony coursing within him, Jasper looks down to see nothing protruding from his upper body.

There’s no spear, and when he snaps his head back up, there’s no Grounder either.

_Hallucination_ , Monty’s voice speaks helpfully in his head—and Jasper knows he’s right. Before, he’d always had others around him to help him distinguish between reality and the imagined, but now he’s all alone. Jasper is losing his sanity.

And he doesn’t know how to get it back.

.

He wakes up, and goes on another rampage.

This time, they gas him before he can get started on destroying the bed again. Jasper runs from wall to wall of the white room, howling, before the gas forces him to his knees. He coughs hard as he inhales the reddish smoke, and his eyes burn as it surrounds him.

Jasper notices that they’ve wrapped each of his cut fingers up carefully, as his head sinks towards the ground, and he resents them for that.

“Watch me tear this room down,” He slurs before he hits the floor, out cold.

.

Jasper wakes up in the white room, for the tenth time, and feels sluggish.

They’ve started to drug him, he’s noticed, and he throws the IV bags so hard against the wall that they burst, and the mystery cocktail slides down the white paint. He smirks up at the security camera, and struggles to stand unaided.

Maybe he’s finally beginning to be seen as a threat, that they’ve had to resort to such measures.

Jasper paces around the room a few times, certain that he’s been moved several times while he was under. He regains his balance and clarity of mind during those laps of the space, and he rolls his neck slowly, cracking the small bones loudly.

“You’ll never break me,” He says clearly, just as the shadows in the corner lunge at him. Jasper flinches back from them, kicking out savagely, and waits until his hallucinations melt back into the blank whiteness. He stares back up at the camera again; neck craned and eyes wide, “You’ll never break me.”

Neither Jasper nor the silent figures that follow him acknowledge the fact that he’s clearly already broken.

He doesn’t have nightmares, because he doesn’t sleep anymore—just drifts from consciousness to unconsciousness, all depending on a red gas. So it seems logical that his fears would haunt him in his waking moments, while he tries to bring the building down around him.

Jasper gets as far as breaking the window again, and landing a bloody handprint on the outside corridor before they bring him down again. He hopes that it’s someone’s job to clean his blood away, every time he makes it that far.

He wonders who has to haul him off to a new, clean room each time.

.

He wakes up, and is struck by sheer loneliness.

Jasper still hasn’t gotten used to the isolation. He’s been incarcerated before, back on the ARK, but there had been communal meal-times then, and his cell had been surrounded by dozens of others. This time, this prison, is painfully different.

There hasn’t been sight of another soul in weeks, and the only voice that Jasper has heard is his own. He sees people all the time, but those are Grounders or dark figures in the corner—and Jasper is almost sure that they’re not real, so he hasn’t been counting them as actual people.

He spends a long time curled up on the floor, thinking about his friends. The fear is crushing, this time around, and he bites down on his lip and breaks the skin.

Jasper looks up at the security camera that always gets fixed, no matter how he destroys it, and feels the blood running down his chin, “Just give them back. Give them back to me.” It’s one of those instances where he doesn’t think that he can go on without someone, anyone, and tears mingle with the sweat on his cheeks.

Eventually, he drags himself off the ground, and transfers the hurt into his only talent these days: destruction.

He spends his time trying to rip the white off the walls, by scraping relentlessly at the pain with his fingernails. Jasper’s seen enough white by this stage, that it gives him a sick kind of pleasure to see imperfect scarlet lines running down the walls.

After staring at the white spaces for so long, Jasper starts to see the reflections of his friends in the blurring blankness, and that makes him roar.

He punches at the walls for what feels like hours, until his hands go numb, and the scars imprinted on his hands and arms fade away in the haze of exhaustion. When he finally breaks through one of the first layers of plaster, gas is pumped out of the vents, and he doesn’t get any time to celebrate.

Jasper stares at that tiny hole until his eyes roll back in his head, and thinks, _I’m coming, guys._

.

He wakes up, and this time it’s to the sound of the door opening.

Jasper pulls the IV out deftly, and doesn’t look at the blooming bruise that has become constant in the crook of his arm, as he snatches up the metal stand like its second nature. He springs off the bed, bare feet moving along the floor that he know so well, and see Bellamy peering through the door.

“Jasper—Jasper, thank God, c’mon we have to go now.”

The words bounce around inside his head, and he laughs loudly, throwing his head back manically and gripping the metal weapon tighter. The vision of Bellamy looks at him, concerned, and Jasper bares his teeth in response.

“This is what the hallucinations come down to? Imagining my own rescue?” He breathes in deeply, and lashes out with the stand to crack the sink loudly, “Pathetic!” He swings the IV stand at the walls and the bed, feeling himself breaking down all over again, like he does every damn day.

The fake-Bellamy moves closer, his hands outstretched, and face deeply worried, “Jasper, I’m not sure what you’re seeing, but it’s me—it’s Bellamy. We have to get out of here, so that we can get the others, okay? Just, just put that thing down, and we’ll go.”

Jasper lets out a howl of pain at the unfairness of it all, that he would conjure up this pitiful scenario. He sobs as he swings the stand, and feels a stab of satisfaction as another ceramic chunk falls to the ground. He chucks it at the security camera, like he does almost every day, and watches as fake-Bellamy ducks in fear.

“You won’t break me,” He screams, “I won’t be broken by _you_!”

The figure of fake-Bellamy rushes at him then, and Jasper stills instantly, because this always happens when his hallucinations attack him. He just has to wait another second, and it’ll be gone, just another few moments of pure terror and he’ll be back alone.

This time is different though, and he can feel the solidity and heat of fake-Bellamy as he tackles him into a hug, and knocks away the IV stand purposely at the same time. Jasper can smell smoke and trees on the rough fabric that is pressed against his face, and he shudders violently.

There’s no coming back from this level of insanity.

Calloused hands grab his face then, and a deep voice grounds him, “I’m real, Jasper, I’m here. We need to run now, we need to get out—and then I can convince you that you haven’t been broken. Monty’s waiting for you; we’re all waiting for you outside!”

Jasper flinches away from the touch, and begins to retreat before fake-Bellamy’s hand grabs onto his wrist, “ _Are you sure?_ ” He whispers, and fake-Bellamy nods seriously.

Then they start running, and Jasper finally makes it all the way through that door. The corridor is empty, but the gas is going to come soon, he knows, because the gas always comes when he makes progress. A figure jumps out at him from an empty room, and Jasper swings out with his fists, but fake-Bellamy drags him on.

“Not real, Jasper,” he reassures, “But I am—I promise.”

He gasps loudly as they get further and further, and thinks that maybe this time they haven’t let him wake up – that all this is just happening in his head. Fake-Bellamy drags him through a set of double doors, and Jasper suddenly can’t breathe, because there’s dozens of people around him.

The rest of the 100 look to have been waiting around, because once they catch sight of Jasper and fake-Bellamy, they take off into a run alongside them. The part of his brain that believes this ridiculous scenario wonders why they’d bother waiting for him.

A hallucination of Monty bumps against his side as Jasper struggles to keep up, and he refuses to turn his head and look—because _this is just too cruel_. The hallucination doesn’t say anything, and Jasper is grateful, even if he does flinch away when fake-Monty grabs at his arm in a joyful manner.

He doesn't question the apparent 'plan' that has been put into motion, just follows blindly behind all the figments of his imagination and wonders when he'll snap back awake in his cell. The pink smoke never appears, so that means that he must be dreaming.

Somehow, Jasper ends up clambering through an escape hatch of some sort, one that fake-Bellamy and fake-Finn had discovered after weeks of searching, and then he’s out in the open air with the rest of his hallucinations.

Some of his visions are crying, and others are laughing loudly, but Jasper just covers his face with his scarred hands and wishes that he would just wake up already. He can’t take much more of this deluded hope and excitement.

But they run further into the forest, as fake-Finn and fake-Bellamy pass out crude weapons on the way back to the drop-ship, and Jasper allows himself to indulge a little longer in the hallucinations.

He draws the line when the gates of their camp are closed, and his delusions are cheering.

Jasper backs away from the dancing figures, and hunkers down in the corner, hands gripping tightly to his head. He digs his nails into his hair, and waits for the moment when he wakes up in the white room, with a clean slate again. He squeezes his eyes shut, and curls into a ball, tighter and tighter until his back aches at the strain.

Nothing happens, and he whines loudly.

A hand rests gently on his shoulder, and that only escalates the situation—because none of this is real, and he doesn’t know how much sanity will be left by the time he wakes up, if things keep going at this rate. The pounding in his head intensifies.

“Why can’t I wake up?” He screams suddenly, and then there are voices all around him, coaxing him carefully to open his eyes, “Let me wake up already! Let me _out_ of this!”

Jasper lists to one side, suddenly exhausted by his constant struggle to remain somewhat together, and hands support him until he’s leaning against the wall with his legs sprawled out in front of him. He doesn’t have the energy to resist anymore, and he opens his eyes slowly in response to the worried requests.

He can see them all gathered around him, looking scared as he just shakes his head. Fake-Clarke reaches out to feel his forehead for a fever and check his pulse, and fake-Monty grips tightly onto his hand. Even fake-Bellamy is there, telling him that it’s all real.

His hallucination of Finn leans in closer, and frowns, “When was the last time you slept, Jasper?”

“Pink gas and fighting, pink gas and fighting – it never ends, over and over. Just let me wake up again—let me wake up, and give me my real friends back,” Jasper moans wearily, and a tear slips down his cheek, “You’ll never break me.”

A decision must have been made between his delusions, because suddenly strong arms are lifting him up, and Jasper passes out to the feeling of being carried across camp.

.

He wakes up, and he’s not in a white room.

Clarke is beside him, running soft fingers over the raised scar tissue that goes from his fingertips to his forearms—too many attempts to get out through the glass window. She looks up at him with mournful eyes, and carefully slips her hand into his, intertwines their fingers.

“You’re going to be okay, Jasper,” Clarke says with such conviction that he almost believes her, “Try and sleep now… we’ll still be here when you wake up.”

.

Jasper wakes up every day in the drop-ship, surrounded by his friends, for the next week.

They take turns to talk him through this reality, and gradually he starts to believe them. Monty trembles one day when he gouges a scratch in one of his hands, to see the blood, feel the pain, and realise that it was all real—but he doesn’t stop him. His friend just waits, until the blood stops flowing, and Jasper stops wondering aloud if he’s hallucinating. He lets Monty pull him into a tentative hug, and breathes in the faint smell of moonshine and dirt that hangs around Monty.

He still wakes up a few times, and starts screaming and trying to destroy stuff out of a sick kind of reflex, but no pink gas ever appears. Instead, his friends deftly prevent him from smashing anything important, and wait for him to come out of it.

Eventually, he gets back to normal in his head.

Jasper starts to smile again, proper grins and not just baring his teeth threateningly, and that’s when everyone knows that he’ll be okay. He even laughs genuinely after the first week, at something trivial, and Monty looks like he wants to cry with happiness.

Some of the others say that they remember a manic screaming echoing through the walls, but only once. That it seemed to move every time someone noticed it, like the Mountain Men were constantly relocating the screams. Jasper admits that he lost it every day he spent in Mount Weather, and that their captors kept having to move him to different cells—because he wouldn’t stop destroying them.

He gains a new kind of respect from everyone then.

When he needs to, he rubs at the scars on his fingers to remind himself that he survived, and that they didn’t break him. Jasper came out of Mount Weather stronger than ever, even if it takes him a few more weeks to realise it.

Jasper would not be so easily broken.

.


	2. Chapter 2

Jasper wakes up, and flinches instinctively.

He stays like that for a moment; eyes squeezed shut, awaiting the daily pain that would slam into his chest every time he woke up. But it never comes, and after a minute, Jasper uncurls from his stiff position and takes a hesitant deep breath.

Ribs expand to send air rushing into his lungs, and there’s no agony. There’s no crushing feeling of panic that he can’t breathe, and the ball of pressure that ebbs out from his spear wound is gone. He feels… better.

Jasper sits up cautiously, surveying the white room around him. He tests the softness of the mattress beneath him, and breathes in the antiseptic scent of cleanliness. The whole situation is surreal, and he’s afraid to get his hopes up too much—only to have them dashed by reality.

It’s utterly silent in the room, and he shivers slightly.

Surely all this peace can’t be real, and just for him. Nothing in life has ever been exclusively for him, because the ARK was about distribution and equality. Jasper trembles slightly, at the prospect of the silence and isolation, and almost feels… grateful.

Then he shakes his head, and tries to think of his friends.

They had been stumbling out of the drop-ship after the Grounder battle, and then—then there had been pink smoke, and a bliss that only unconsciousness could award. He looks around at the room, at the peace and lack of pain, and can only come up with one conclusion.

  _He’d been saved_.

The thought makes him feel slightly ill—but he doesn’t know what else to think.

After another eternity spent just staring at the beautifully blank walls, Jasper slowly leans back in the bed and lets every bit of anxiety fade away. He doesn’t look at the security camera, or at the reinforced door to keep him in—he just drifts away.

.

He wakes up, and feels peaceful.

For one of the first times in his life, there’s no pressing need to _do_ anything or _be_ anyone. Jasper feels safe for the first time since they’d landed on earth, and he wants to preserve the emotion—to keep it alive for the times in the future when everything might change.

Maybe if he never leaves this room, things can stay like this.

Jasper lays on the bed for what feels like hours, staring at the ceiling and basking in the bliss of his nothingness. Occasionally, his hand twitches—a constant involuntary action since his impromptu stabbing—but he’s able to ignore it. There’s no one around to stare at his spasming fingers, or frown warily at him, and it feels liberating.

In this imprisonment, Jasper feels free.

His legs drift lazily a few centimetres off the floor, and his feet are clean for the first time in weeks. The realisation that he’s suddenly clean again does nothing to shake his newfound sense of peace, and Jasper considers getting off the bed and exploring the white room around him.

He sees the door, barred from the outside presumably, and the window porthole that could lead to anywhere. He’s aware of the possibilities that the space outside his small, white haven could have—but he feels such a strong sense of apathy towards anything but this peace that spreads through him.

Jasper sits there for hours, just observing and content not to make any other movements.

.

He wakes up, and lays there silently for hours.

Maybe this is what insanity feels like, Jasper wonders, as his eyesight drifts in and out of focus with the blank walls. Maybe insanity is just not caring anymore, feeling no obligation to care or react at all. Insanity must be a sense of security—because nothing hurts anymore, and nothing matters.

Jasper smiles wide, his body stiffening after the hours spent immobile, and decides to shift to his right side, so that he can get a different view of the same four walls.

The walls are always there, always white, and there’s a comforting aspect to the regularity with which the room never deviates from. Jasper still hasn’t ventured from the bed, hasn’t touched the IV in his arm since he first discovered it, and he’s delighted that he feels no need to do either.

There’s safety in this lack of movement, of caring, and he relishes in the blank embrace of the white walls.

.

Jasper wakes up, and begins another day in silence.

He’s no stranger to being imprisoned, no novice to the concept. Back on the ARK, he’d known that it would only be a matter of time before they got him for something, and that sooner or later he’d be making the one way trip out of the airlock. His personality had been too… colourful.

Back then, he’d had Monty as well though. They’d been apprehended together, and tossed into identical cells that neighboured each other, so the idea of solitude was inapplicable.  That had been two years ago, and during the time, Jasper had learned to adapt.

He’d learnt a whole new way of become self-sufficient, from trading luxury items to knowing which prisoners to avoid in the exercise block. It had still been imprisonment, no matter how much the Council had invested to placate the human rights activists on the ARK—but a tamer form of imprisonment for minors.

The Dropship had come next, and _damn_ if it hadn’t felt like being put in cuffs for the first time all over again when they strapped him roughly into the harness. That time, the prison had been a metal box hurtling to the Ground at terrifying speeds. He’d thought that he’d been a goner, for sure.

But he’d survived that as well, and battled through the next few months, literally fighting for his life at times. It had been a new environment, as harsh and dangerous as being different on the ARK had been, and he’d paid dearly for the experiences. This room though, it doesn’t seem to be a prison, for once.

Finally, Jasper doesn’t feel like he’s struggling.

.

He wakes up, and spends the day in thought.

Jasper thinks about the fact that he hasn’t seen anyone since he’d been saved. Something tells him that there are others around, people who work behind the door, and keep the IV bags beside his bed replenished. There must be people to remake his bed when he falls asleep in it, and change the sheets daily to keep them fresh and crisp.

He’s just never seen then.

A stray thought comes into his mind then, that maybe he should feel uneasy about it, that maybe he should try… fighting back. But fight back against what?

Things are finally easy and comfortable for the first time in his life, and Jasper doesn’t think that he can let go of the feeling, no matter how much he should—because he simply doesn’t want to.

.

Jasper wakes up, and decides to try walking to the door for the first time.

He stays frozen in a sitting position for long hours though, before he can work up the courage to actually make contact with the ground. The freezing sensation of pain that shoots through his feet upon initial contact is enough to make him choke on a breath, and scramble back up into a curled ball.

Somehow, he doesn’t remember being this afraid before – not even when he’d been speared, because even then death hadn’t seemed quite as dangerous as cold lino—and for the first time Jasper thinks that this place might be detrimental in some ways.

He tucks his face against his knees, and trembles on his mattress—trying to remind himself that he’s safe, and that nothing can touch him in the white heaven.

His hand twitches more regularly, jerking against the crisp sheets, and Jasper swallows his sobs and crushes his shaking hand in between his legs.

_No one can touch me in here_ , he chants to himself – and even his inner dialogue sounds terrified _, safe safe safe away from the Ground_.

A small part of him feels an emotion akin to self-disgust, but the rest of his mind is too caught up in the trance—and he starts to feel better finally. He is safe in this isolation, and the colour white has never been as comforting.

.

He wakes up, days later, and tries again.

This time, he makes it halfway across the room. Jasper can’t quite walk right though, his gait reduced to a pathetic hunched limp of some such description—from the weeks of cowering and still contemplation that he had spent, all that space away on the bed.

He drags the IV stand along carefully with him, leaning on it heavily in his attempt to walk. Jasper thinks back fleetingly on the times when he’d ran through the forest, even after the spear and with explosions of pain in his chest. Now… now he can barely make it across a small room.

His world has been reduced to four blank walls, but somehow it feels larger than ever.

There’s a sudden scuffle of noise from the world outside the door, and the quiet noise shatters Jasper’s mind-set. He falls to his knees instantly, and it hurts—hitting the unforgiving ground so unrelentlessly—and folds in on himself, hands pressed tightly over his ears.

The IV pole clatters to the ground as well, and the secondary noise just about makes Jasper pass out. This feels a thousand times harder and more painful than his first venture outside the camp had been since his spearing, and the realisation scares him.

_What’s happening to him?_

There’s no time to dwell on the thought though, because the cold seems to be seeping inside of him, and he can’t stop trembling on the ground. He’s vulnerable, terrified, and _not safe_.

Jasper succumbs to the fear and terror quickly and quietly, and allows himself to slip away into his mind—away from the jarring sounds and strange textures, and to a place where it’s comfortably blank and numb, and where he doesn’t have to be afraid of his _fear_.

.

He wakes up, and feels an overwhelming rush of relief to find that he’s back on the bed.

His knees are slightly bruised and swollen underneath the loose white trousers that he’s wearing, the only indication that his fall to the ground had happened. He brushes his fingertips gently across the affected areas, and shudders silently—wishing that he’d never decided to see what had been causing him pain. Jasper tugs down the bottoms of the trousers, and looks away, desperate to forget the events of the disastrous incident.

Jasper brings his non-twitching hand up to tug at his hair slightly, seeing a dark tuft of hair breaching his clear line of sight to the white walls of his freedom—and is hit by the memory of Raven offering to cut his hair. He freezes for a few second, transfixed by the vibrant colours and sounds of the flashback, and feels a foreign sense of longing and… _loneliness._

His body responds by hunching over even more, and his consciousness reminds him sharply that he craves the solitude and isolation—because he’s _safe_ here. He’s secure, and relieved— _grateful_ —for the white room, and everything that it brings with it.

There’s a soft thumping sound that his hand makes as it shakes periodically against the pressed sheets.

Jasper tries to ignore it, and focus on the white walls, but he can’t banish the _colours_ that the memory had ignited inside him.

.

He wakes up, and feels comfortably numb again.

The day passes in a blur of inactivity, as Jasper revels in the familiarity of the nothingness.

He can be safe here, like he never was on the Ground before, and he can be alone here, where no one can hurt him. Jasper’s not sure if he’s _happy_ , as such, but it’s easy to slip into the trance of apathy and be so content, like he never has been before.

Jasper can exist here, and he doesn’t know if things can get better than that.

.

He wakes up, and this time it’s to the screeching sound of metal.

Jasper scrambles up so fast that he slams his back against the white, hard surface of the wall behind him, and his vision blurs. When it returns, all he can see is a dark figure coming towards him, a tall body dressed in back that _doesn’t belong_ in his white heaven.

The noises are disorientating—thuds of boots against the cold lino that Jasper hadn’t been able to face again after the first proper attempt, and the jumbled, jagged noise of words. Jasper can’t distinguish the initial few words from beneath the blanket of fear that’s wrapped tightly around him, and he shrinks back against the white walls, where he belongs.

“—on! Jasper, get up and let’s go!”

He doesn’t recognise this voice, or the man who is getting closer and _closer_ to him—an offensive new scent attacking his senses, so different from the perfect antiseptic blend. Jasper tries to make a sound of surrender in the back of his throat, but nothing comes out, only a grating sense of pain down his larynx.

Finally the figure reaches him, and lunges out to grab his wrist, and Jasper reacts.

He jerks back suddenly, and crashes off the bed onto the other side, immediately scooting away from the stranger with his resisting body. The face that seems to leer down at him looks confused, and Jasper just squeezes his eyes shut, hoping and praying that he’ll be shown mercy.

Another harsh round of words are thrown at him, and Jasper can only shake silently and feel his hand thump against the ground with the force of his nervous twitches.

Then the noise ends, and Jasper dares to wonder if he’s safe again.

He looks up cautiously and hopefully—but he’s soon rewarded for his troubles with another surge of terror, because this time the stranger is standing still, _staring_ at him. Jasper immediately breaks the eye contact, and fixes his gaze on the ground— _not a threat, not a threat, just leave me, not a threat_.

Something even worse happens then.

“I need some help in here! Monty! There’s something wrong with Jasper! Finn!” The stranger yells out loudly, a clear note of urgency present in his voice, and Jasper flinches violently at the way the man holds his hands up in a non-threatening way at him, trying to placate him in some way.

Two more figures come crashing into the room, and Jasper gives into the temptation and simply curls up into a ball, hands clamped over his ears. It doesn’t do anything to block out the sounds though.

“What the—what’s going on?”

A second voice chimes in then, sounding concerned in a way that Jasper hasn’t heard in weeks, “What did you _do_?”

More footsteps come towards him, and Jasper starts to flinch at seemingly regular intervals, in some kind of jerky imitation of a fit. The original man sounds frustrated then, and his voice is harsh and stressed, “He freaked out when I came in – but we don’t have time for this. We have to get out and then deal with whatever…” there’s an odd pause while the stranger trails off, a strange note of worry piercing his words, “whatever _this_ is.”

“Right.”

Jasper works himself into such a state of denial about the whole situation that he can feel his heart skip a beat when rough hands grasp his shoulders, seemingly out of nowhere. He struggles, and fights to remain in his safe position against the wall, but more hands are suddenly tugging at his body now—and then force him into an upright position.

Concerned eyes bore into his terrified ones, and he can barely hold himself up as they support him. There’s a tense silence for a moment or so, and Jasper longs to pretend that this is all a dream.

But then they start dragging him towards the doorway.

He seizes his body up and shakes his head so violently that he nearly passes out, but the two people on either side of him seem to be made of steel. They get closer to the door, and Jasper’s struggles only increase. He can’t leave this room, can’t cross the boundary into whatever awaits him in the space beyond his white, blank haven.

Words tumble out of his mouth, pleas and cries for them to leave him, but no sound follows—and Jasper realises then that not uttering a sound for weeks on end had temporarily robbed him of his ability to speak. The others seem to pick up on his distress fairly rapidly, and they drag him faster.

The first stranger – _Bellamy_ , his name is Bellamy—reaches across and rips the IV out of his arm as they near the doorway, and Jasper twists his face into a scream of pain and fear as he feels blood dribble slowly down his arm. His feet are scrambling and pushing against the floor, but even despite his height advantage he can’t seem to slow their pace at all.

Jasper can’t even stand up straight, he realises with a jolt, and his limbs are fatiguing at a rate that shakes him to the core.

His struggles gradually get weaker, and he eventually ends up being carried over the threshold of the room—his two arms slung over the shoulders of his tormentors, tearing him away from the solitude and security that he’d craved.

He tries to twist one more time and arch his back, just to get a final glimpse into the small haven that had been created for _him_.

Then the people on either side of him—and the one on his right seems so familiar, the one with dark hair and tears in his eyes—pick up speed and hurry him around a few corners. Jasper tries to memorise the route, on the off chance that he’s able to get away and drag his stiffened body back to those four walls.

Jasper lets his head hang down when he sees the array of people that they arrive into—all shouting and jostling each other, all running restlessly in the same direction. There’s screaming and crying, loud crashes and background noise—and the _colours_ ….

He can feel himself getting weaker, and Jasper lets go of any resolve that he’d had to stay conscious. This time, he hopes that he doesn’t wake up.

His last sensation is of the arches of his feet dragging over unfamiliar surfaces, and his chin bouncing painfully against his chest as the strangers started to run—taking him far away from safety. _Leave me here, please just leave me—_ he tries to say, but he’s too far gone.

.

Jasper wakes up, and he’s outstretched on his back.

There are rocks digging into his back, a faint breeze blowing across his face, and someone holding on gently to his wrist. He supresses the urge to flinch away, and instead opens his eyes slowly.

Blonde hair flashes in his field of vision, and the stranger squeezes his wrist with a smile as she moves back to sit on her hunkers, “Jasper. How are you feeling?” He shrinks back against the hard, unrelenting ground and shiver beneath the stare of the person from before.

There’s still no sound when he opens his mouth to speak, but he makes the movements anyway, “ _Monty_.” The boy looks delighted for a few short seconds, as Jasper processes the information he’d regained in his mind—Monty, his best friend, dragged him through the doors of his room, “ _Take me back_.”

“Wha—what did you say, Jasper?” Monty asks quietly, after a long pause. He looks afraid to hear the answer, and Jasper knows that he’s understood the first time around. He repeats it silently anyway.

“ _Take me back_.” His friend begins to shake his head, horrified, and the girl lets out a quiet gasp. “ _Please._ ”

.

He wakes up, and makes a run for it.

Jasper’s folded carefully into a corner of their temporary camp, back against a tree and as far away from the others as he can manage. There’s a few people wandering around, looking exhilarated to be out in the open air again, even though the muted sound of their laughter is making Jasper’s hand twitch violently with anxiety.

His legs protest the slightest of movements, but he manages to get himself on his feet, however unsteadily, with one hand braced on the tree beside him. Jasper doesn’t see the pair of eyes that track his movements from the other side of camp, watching him carefully.

He takes a moment to guess which direction his white haven would be in, and then just decides to make a blind choice.

Then he’s sprinting away from the others, stumbling and staggering through the undergrowth. A cry goes up from the people he’s left behind, and he almost falls to the ground when he hears it.

“Jasper! _Jasper_ , get back here!”

The sound of footsteps racing behind him makes Jasper want to throw up in fear and simultaneously break down in tears, because he knows what’s coming next. He holds out for as long as his body is able, but eventually a hand grabs onto the back of his tattered and dirtied white attire, and yanks him back.

He struggles and moans, but more people move in to ‘help.’

They bring him back to camp, and the sensation of so many hands on him and gazes washing over his thin body makes Jasper’s skin crawl. Monty looks devastated, scrambling up from where he’d been asleep only minutes ago beside Jasper, and he looks away in shame.

The one with the blonde hair – Clarke—kneels down beside him as Bellamy carefully forces him down to sit on the ground, and she reaches out to touch his shoulder. He trembles.

“You’re sick, Jasper,” Bellamy tells him, from where he leans against a tree, looking more concerned than Jasper had ever remembered him, “They took you away from us, and turned you against us. You’re confused, but we’ll get you back.”

Clarke nods, tears in her eyes, and Jasper can’t bring himself to look at Monty, “We’re your friends.”

“ _No_ ,” the word is torn from between his lips, but Jasper isn’t sure.

.

He wakes up, and doesn’t try to run. The cycle repeats itself for several days.

Each long stretch of twenty four hours is roughly the same – gather supplies, fight to survive the radiated Ground, scrounge whatever scraps for dinner, sleep. Rinse, and repeat. Jasper watches their routine silently, and only moves when Clarke coaxes him to his feet to shuffle awkwardly around their haphazard camp a few times each day.

His legs are skinny and weak after so much time spent unresponsive, and they cramp up during the night when everyone else is sleeping, bar the few people on watch around the camp.

Jasper struggles to acclimate, to remember how to live properly.

But his mind keeps slipping back to the security and comfort of the white room, so pure and untouched in those blank walls.

He didn’t have to force berries down his parched throat there, didn’t have to rely on any nutrition because the IV did it for him. He didn’t have to curl up tightly against the freezing ground every evening there and hope that his shivers would subside long enough for him to sleep.

Most of all, Jasper didn’t have to spend every second of every day terrified of the harsh people around him.

The only ones he can communicate with without flinching or shying away are Monty and Clarke, and Bellamy to a degree though all he does is stare and narrow his eyes at Jasper silently. The white room, however safe and comforting it had been – had broken something within him.

And he wants to go back so badly that it aches deep inside his chest, where his spear wound had once throbbed.

.

Jasper wakes up, and feels his heart miss a beat when Monty’s face comes into view only a few inches away from his own.

His teeth dig into his lower lip in shock and fear, but he doesn’t make a sound – hasn’t since he woke up on that first day back on the Ground again, not that he’d really left it. His friend just smiles adamantly, smoothing over any hurt or upset that Jasper’s reaction had evoked.

Monty’s good at pretending that everything is back to normal, that Jasper isn’t some broken shell of his own self.

“Morning, Jasper!” He exclaims in an upbeat tone, and Jasper can only hear a small note of weariness in his voice. He’s impressed, and even goes as far as to incline his head slightly in small greeting, which is more than he’d been able to offer previously.

Monty beams, and Jasper wonders if the twitch of his own lips counts as a smile.

.

He wakes up, and weeks have passed since he was torn away from his safety.

Jasper rises slowly to his feet, and doesn’t allow himself to look towards Mount Weather, where he now knows they were held—he doesn’t even really want to. The fire is still smouldering when he reaches it, and he hunches over to get some of its warmth.

Someone jostles him on their way past, and he squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, before refocusing on the fire and calming himself.

On the other side of camp, Bellamy catches the movement and nods to himself, a satisfied look on his face.

Later, when more people have gathered and Jasper’s forced himself to remain in close proximity to them, he realises that it’s not bad. He relaxes slightly, and notices that the others aren’t even shooting worried looks in his direction anymore.

Monty flops down in a heap beside him then, and he lets the other boy stretch out his arms and yawn loudly. Patrol.

“I—I’m sorry. Monty. I understand now.”

Jasper’s words cause everyone to still and quiet down, but he only has eyes for his friend. Monty turns to look at him with tears in his eyes, and seems transfixed by his words. Monty tilts his head to the side, and Jasper copies the movement, remembering conversations and interactions from years past that feel familiar.

“It’s good to have you back.”

It’s taken him months to reach this point of understanding, and maybe he’ll never be fully back. But he knows that he’s over the hardest part now, and the slight throb that pangs out from his chest feels comforting in a different way than the white room had. He rubs a hand lightly over the scar on his chest, takes a deep breath, and looks back towards Mount Weather and the white room.

Jasper would not be so easily broken.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally finished with this now - even though it took me a while to get the second part up. Note: this was all written before I've watched the new season, I wanted to do it all without any hints or guesses as to what'll happen in the show. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed it though, and I'd appreciate any comments or feedback! Thanks for staying with this.
> 
> Now excuse me while I rush off to indulge in season two.


End file.
